by Darci Hannah
Obviously, whoever else was on the docks had no idea I’d been watching them. I had the element of surprise, and I was going to use it. With a head exploding from indignation, and a heart demanding answers, I grabbed my flashlight and cell phone, and descended the tower stairs as swiftly as I could.
“Come on, Welly,” I whispered, pulling him into the cool darkness with me. We left the lighthouse grounds and made our way onto the beach. It was then that I realized that Mike was loading all the sacks of flour onto his boat. And I caught a glimpse of the other man.
Anger consumed me, spurring me to run faster across the beach. Because, once again, I realized that I had been used. When I hit the halfway mark, I also realized that I was in the remotest point on the long stretch of beach. The lighthouse was far behind me; the marina loomed in the distance. Then, suddenly, Wellington stopped. I took another step or two until his booming bark broke the silence.
A frisson of fear shot through me at the same moment a beam of a light broke the darkness, casting my shadow on the beach before me. I spun around. Momentarily blinded by the light, I grabbed Wellington by the collar and brought my arm up to shield my eyes. In one painful clench, all the blood drained from my heart.
“Dylan,” I said, and stared at the gun in her hand.
CHAPTER 42
“Where ya going, Lindsey?” Her tone was conversational, but I was too stunned to speak, and she knew it. Wellington, normally greeting her with wagging tail, was clearly agitated by her sudden appearance. He emitted a low growl as she added, “You should be asleep, safely tucked in bed. Him too.”
“I haven’t been sleeping very well, not with the bakery being shut down.”
“Well, that is a pity.” Her pretty face clouded as if she meant it, but then her eyes hardened again.
Wellington, sensing my fear, let out a series of earth-shattering barks.
“My God, the barking! Barking! Barking! Barking!” she mocked. “Stop the barking, Lindsey, or I’ll have to stop it myself.” She flipped her dark ponytail behind her back and aimed her gun at my dog.
Dylan had officially snapped, and it broke my heart. I’d thought we were friends; she had gone out of her way to help me, and she’d been a dream of an employee. What the heck had she gotten herself into? Wellington was straining against his collar as he barked at her. He was a big dog, and strong. I held on for dear life. “Dylan,” I pleaded, “I don’t know what this is all about, but please put down the gun and let’s talk. You’re scaring Welly. He doesn’t like guns pointed in his face.”
“Not my fault,” she said, holding her gun steady.
“Okay. Okay, don’t shoot. Let me send him away.”
“I swear, if he comes toward me, I’m putting a bullet in him.”
I’d never been so scared in my life. Welly was more than a dog. He was my best friend, a constant companion, a calming presence in a world of chaos. I needed to send him to safety, but I wasn’t sure he would go. I knelt in the sand beside him and gave him a long hug, thinking I might never get the chance to feel his soft fur again. Fighting back tears, I took a deep breath, tried to smile, and held his giant head between my hands. “Wellington, go home.” Then, with forced excitement in my voice, I commanded, “Get fish. Get fish!” and pointed down the beach, hoping he would know what that meant. Slightly confused, he took two steps toward Dylan. She lowered the gun at the same time I sternly commanded, “Get fish!”
Welly lifted his head and looked at me. I fought hard to remain calm and prayed that all his obedience training would override his natural instincts. Apparently, it did. He turned and disappeared into the darkness.
“ ‘Get fish’? That’s your command? No wonder he’s a muddleheaded nuisance.” Flashing mean-girl attitude, she picked up a rock and threw it as hard as she could in Wellington’s direction.
I flinched and was infinitely grateful when I heard it hit the sand. Angry, she swung her light down the beach. The rock was where she had thrown it; Wellington had disappeared. She might have wanted to investigate that further but knew that the longer her attention was on my dog, the more time I had to subvert her efforts. I was about to make my move when the gun, and the light, swung back to me.
“Give me your phone!” Angry, she snatched it from my hand. She looked at the unsent text and shook her head. “Tuck? As in Officer Tuck McAllister?”
“He’s a policeman.”
“He’s an idiot. Shame on you!” She cast me a look of extreme annoyance as she erased the text. She then shoved my phone in her pocket.
Welly was gone and now my phone. I felt extremely vulnerable.
“Stupid move, Lindsey,” she warned. “You must know by now that I can’t let you live. You saw us, and now it’s over.”
“I saw something,” I agreed. “But I’m still unclear as to what this is all about.”
“It’s about our little side business, one we’ve been conducting right under your nose.”
Although her answer caused another wave of prickling fear, it was nothing compared to the barrel of the gun she was pointing at me. Unsure of what to do next, she brought out her phone and dialed a number. “Hey, babe,” she addressed the voice on the other end. “Lindsey’s seen us. I have her. What do you want me to do with her?” She gave a curt nod and ended the call.
“Really?” I said, and gave her my best girl, you’re crazy look.
The one thing my inner New Yorker loathed was the feeling of vulnerability. Like a suit of protective armor, it came up around me, unleashing my no-nonsense city-girl attitude with a vengeance. Dylan had been conducting some kind of illegal business at my lighthouse; she had threatened to shoot my dog, and now she had my cell phone. It was time to go on the attack!
“You’re taking advice from a man?” I poked. “That’s so nineteen-fifties. Wait, you were talking to Carl, right?” I gave a disparaging shake of my head. “That’s even worse, considering he’s probably taking orders from Mike, which means you’re basically shackled to the patriarchy. You’re their puppet, Dylan; their tool. And if you’re planning on using that gun on me, you might as well just flush your girl-power card down the toilet with your dignity.”
“Stop it,” she spat. I had gotten under her skin.
I wasn’t exactly a modern feminist. I was a confident woman who loved working with other confident people and, for better or worse, loved men. I also believed that women needed the support of other women, unless they were holding a gun to your head. In that case, the gloves were off. “Dylan, as your friend and your boss, here’s the truth. You don’t need to be involved in your boyfriend and cousin’s illicit dealings, whatever they may be. You’re better than that. You’re a gifted baker.”
Illuminated by the flashlight, her face contorted as if battling an inner demon. “I sometimes think that’s true, but it’s not. I make bad choices, Lindsey. I can’t help it. I just do.” I was about to counter this when she poked the gun at me, indicating that I walk down the beach with her. “I like baking,” she admitted. “It calms me. And I liked working with you. But I knew from the very start that things were not going to end well.” Her voice broke a little as she added, “I thought about turning them in, but I hardly know you, and Mike and Carl are all I have. Mike’s taken care of me all my life. Carl can be a mean son of a gun, but Mike trusts him, and I know he has my back. Mike and I, we don’t come from the best family, ya know. No silver spoons in our mouths. We’ve had to work for everything we’ve had. We’re survivors, and we can’t say no to easy money.”
I took a deep breath. It was quite a confession, but I still believed I could reason with her.
“Well, for obvious reasons,” I began, trying to ignore the gun in my back as I walked, “I’m not going to offer advice on men, but I do know a little about money. And here’s the truth: There’s no such thing as easy money. The trouble with money is that there are always strings attached. Take a loan from the bank and you’ll be paying interest for the term of that loan; take a moneta
ry gift from a friend and morally you’ll owe them something of equal value in return; steal money and you’ll be paying it off in prison. The best kind of money, Dylan, is the kind you earn yourself through hard work, perseverance, and smart choices. Just like you were doing at the Beacon.”
“Aren’t you listening to me?” she seethed, growing truly angry. “I wasn’t making smart choices, or I wouldn’t be here now. And here’s the truth of it, Lindsey. You should have stayed in New York with your fancy job, your douchey boyfriend, and your easy life. This is a small town. We have our secrets.” She shoved me forward again, causing me to stumble in the sand.
“Maybe I should have,” I admitted, thinking of my safe and secure life in the Big Apple. “But I needed a change. I honestly never thought I’d buy a lighthouse, Dylan, but the moment I saw the Beacon Harbor Lighthouse for sale on the internet, I had the feeling that I was meant to be here.”
“Well, that was your mistake.”
“Look, whatever you’re involved in here, I can help you. Just please, put down the gun,” I pleaded.
“It’s too late, Lindsey. I killed that woman. I poisoned her coffee. It was supposed to be Betty, but I can’t even get that right.”
The moment Dylan had pulled the gun on me, I assumed she was connected to the murders, but hearing her admit it induced a whole new level of fear in me. “What? That was you? Why? Betty believes in you. She cares about you. She was so happy that you were working at my bakery.”
“Poor Betty. She was happy to sell the old lighthouse the moment she knew it would be a bakery. She knew I could bake and wanted to give me the opportunity to use my skills again.”
“But that’s wonderful,” I said, thinking that Betty was the closest thing Dylan had to a guardian angel. That she should try to kill her was unthinkable.
“Wonderful?” she spat. “It’s a lot of pressure to live under. You don’t know this, but Betty is my godmother. All my life she’s been trying to help me, and all my life I’ve been disappointing her. Do you know how that feels—having a mother who doesn’t care about you and a nosy do-gooder of the town who goes out of her way, trying to save your ass at every turn? I’m a screwup, Lindsey. I’m a constant disappointment, and she knows it!”
“Easy,” I said, feeling the gun poking in my back with her anger. “Betty is a charitable woman, and you’re lucky to have her in your life. What I don’t understand is why you tried to poison her with cyanide.”
She grunted. “Because Mike told me I had to.”
“What? And you listened to him?”
“I had to. Betty was a threat to our little side business. You see, Mike is also Betty’s godchild. She adores him, always has, and would never believe he’d do anything to hurt the town. You may not know this, but before you bought the lighthouse, Mike was the caretaker of the property, making sure it didn’t get too run-down. Betty helped get him appointed to the job. Thought he could use the extra money to supplement his fishing charter and Uber driving business. I told you that we used to hang out at the old lighthouse as kids, getting into trouble, remember? Well, once Mike got the keys to the lighthouse, our old habits kicked up again. You see, Mike has charm, and Betty trusts him completely.”
“Again, why did you try to kill her? It makes no sense!”
“Because Betty was about to ruin everything. And you were going to provide us with the perfect means to keep our little operation going. Mike gave me the cyanide. Told me to slip it in Betty’s drink when she came in on opening day, as we all knew she would. Having Betty die in your bakeshop would solve two problems. It would get rid of the nosy do-gooder, while giving Mike near total control of her property. And you’d be the one to blame for her death. With the bakery in a tailspin, I’d step in and offer to keep it going while you were in jail. In a few months we’d have enough money to buy it from you. I’d run the bakery, and Mike and Carl would have the means to run their business.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve been using me and my lighthouse from the start! I don’t know who’s worse, you three or my cheating pig of an ex-fiancé.”
“But Betty didn’t die,” she continued, ignoring my outburst. “How was I to know that you had pissed off a crazy little diva? And I certainly wasn’t prepared for her anger. Imagine my surprise when I saw her rip that cyanide-laced latte from Betty’s hand.”
“You watched her do it!” I said. “You knew she was going to die, and yet you said nothing.”
“Really? What was I supposed to say? Hey, don’t drink that, it’s laced it with poison? Not likely. And anyhow, it created the distraction we needed. Your bakery was shut down and you were suspect number one. When I asked to keep working, it wasn’t really about the money. I needed to be there to handle things.”
“But you were baking,” I reasoned. “You were also helping us solve the murder.”
“I was with you,” she explained, “because you might have gotten suspicious if I wasn’t. It was a good plan. After that little diva died, Mike got spooked and backed off Betty, hoping the murder would distract her long enough for us to finish what we started. But then Betty remembered that it was her latte that killed your friend.”
“Wait. I’m confused,” I admitted. “You’re smuggling bags of flour out of my lighthouse and were trying to kill Betty because she cares about you?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Dylan’s voice held a tinge of disbelief. “Dear Lord, even nosy Betty was figuring it out, and that was the problem. She was watching it happen right under her nose. She has a perfect view of the lighthouse from her office window, and yet she didn’t want to believe such illicit dealings could happen in her precious town, or that Mike and I were the masterminds behind it.”
Dylan stopped talking long enough to shove me behind a tall outcropping of rocks. I realized too late that she had taken me to the most secluded spot on the beach. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as an image floated in my mind. Somehow, I knew with every fiber of my being that Captain Willy Riggs had stood in this same spot long ago. And on this same spot he had died. I thought it a bizarre twist in a surreal tale, because if Dylan had her way, I would die here too.
“We needed to get rid of Betty,” she continued, knowing her confession wouldn’t matter. “Betty was growing suspicious. She pulled me aside before the bakery opened, asking a lot of questions about the Oberland Dairy deliveries.”
“So, Frank Peters wasn’t really delivering our dairy products?” I asked, wanting to keep her talking.
“Frank Peters doesn’t work for Oberland Dairy. He painted his truck to look like he does. Josh Cramer is the real delivery guy. He came last Wednesday at nine a.m. Betty knows the difference. She saw him as well as the other delivery truck Frank uses. She asked me if I was having a fling with the Oberland Dairyman because he’s at the lighthouse so often. We all knew she was growing suspicious, and we couldn’t take the chance.”
“You were the one who ordered the sandwich at Harbor Hoagies,” I stated, realizing how it all made sense.
“I did, and hired a kid off the street to deliver it to Betty’s office. Saying it was from you was a nice touch, don’t you think? You were the prime suspect in Mia Long’s death. Blaming you for Betty’s death would connect the two. You’d be behind bars, and I’d keep the bakery running. But it didn’t work out that way.”
“Only by the sheer grace of God,” I added. “But why flour?” As I kept her talking, I realized Mike’s boat had been loaded. Frank Peters in his dairy truck was leaving the marina. That’s when I noticed a man making his way toward us on the beach. It was Carl.
“Flour?” she repeated, and gave an unhinged croak of a laugh. “You really are the most gullible big city girl I’ve met. Think more expensive, and far more addictive.”
“Cocaine?” I asked, horrified. “Oh my God, you haven’t been storing cocaine in my bakery?”
“Not cocaine. Heroin. Used to be pot, but now that it’s legal everyone’s growing it.
We were too, on Betty’s land that Mike has unprecedented access to. We have quite the production going on out there. But we’ve branched out. Heroin’s the new drug of choice. Mike picks the load up from his supplier out on the lake in the dead of night. Frank in the Oberland truck picks it up from the dock and delivers it to our secret cabin on Betty’s land. There we process it, hiding it in sacks of flour.”
“That’s what you’re storing in my bakery? Heroin hidden in sacks of flour?” I was beyond outraged.
“Yep. There it waits, sitting harmlessly in storage until it’s time to deliver it to our buyer. That happens on the lake too. And that’s where we’re going now, to meet up with him. From there the seemingly harmless sacks of flour are taken up to Canada and delivered to another storage unit run by the cartels. Pretty ingenious, isn’t it?”
“No!” I seethed. “It’s utterly despicable.”
“Yeah, well, nobody suspects a sleepy little town like Beacon Harbor of being a link in the drug chain, and that’s why it works. And it’ll keep working, once you and Betty are out of the way.”
The fact that she could talk so plainly about murder and her role in moving one of the most heinous drugs in history—using my bakeshop as a front, no less—pushed me over the edge.
“You’re not a puppet of the patriarchy,” I cried. “You’re a parasitic drug mule!” Before she had time to react to that, I kicked her as hard as I could in the shin. She dropped the gun and moaned. Seizing my opening, I shoved her with all my might into the rocks. Dylan fell. I dashed around her, aiming for the open beach and my lighthouse, but I had underestimated her strength. I might have had the advantage of height, but Dylan was built like a tenacious woman wrestler. With the speed of a striking viper, her hand shot out, grabbing my ankle and twisting it. I fell to the ground beside her. We then both scrambled for the gun.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I was officially in a girl fight. As Dylan pummeled me like a lump of overworked dough, I slapped, clawed, and elbowed my way through the sand, searching for the gun. “Ouch,” I cried. She was on my back and had ripped a lock of my hair from my scalp. It burned. “Dammit!” I elbowed her with all my might in the thigh.
